Meat packing plants use overhead conveyor rails to move and store carcasses. The rails receive deposits of meat products such as blood, juice, grease, and oil from the carcasses and packing processes. Since the carcasses hang below the rails, the deposits on the rails are a contamination hazard as anything falling from the rail falls in the plane of the carcasses. Carcasses so contaminated are rejected by the meat inspectors. It is thus necessary to maintain the rails in a clean condition.
However, to manually clean the rails it is necessary that ladders or cleaning means on long poles be used by workmen. The brushes, mops, etc., employed in the manual process spray and slop cleaning agents and removed dirt over an area creating added contamination hazard. This situation becomes aggravated when a workman is cleaning a rail between other rails upon which carcasses are hanging. It thus becomes necessary to clear a large area around the rail being cleaned and this necessitates repeated changes and movements. In storage areas and rooms, the rails are so closely spaced that the carcasses abut one another in a mass of meat making it very difficult to clean a rail without clearing the whole area or room.
A dominant factor is that cleaning the rails in a meat packing plant is a very dirty and laborious job so that a workman's productivity quickly diminishes to an objectionable low level both as to the length of rails cleaned and the quality of the cleaning job.